Welcome to Linguistic DNA

The aim of Linguistic DNA was to understand the evolution of early modern thought by modelling the semantic and conceptual changes which occurred in English discourse (c.1500-c.1800). The project used information extraction techniques, Big Data computing infrastructure, and data visualisation to identify billions of lexical patterns in 250,000 texts.

Linguistic DNA was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), grant number AH/M00614X/1. The project was a collaboration between English historical linguists at the universities of Sheffield, Glasgow and Sussex, The Digital Humanities Institute and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.